


Hills of Iowa

by the_moonmoth



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, Post-Series, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-19
Updated: 2015-06-19
Packaged: 2018-04-05 03:00:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4163118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_moonmoth/pseuds/the_moonmoth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She felt bigger here, like the landscape. Like she could unfold everything she was and still find space for it all. [Roughly 2 years post-NFA].</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hills of Iowa

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t know, folken. I blame Angearia. She started talking about future!Buffy’s job potential and somehow it took me here. Probably the closest I will ever come to songfic, but damn, [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6o2aECUFgE) resonates. Shoutout to Quinara who (inadvertently, I’m sure) taught me a lesson recently about paring things back. Unbeta’d but please point out any issues/typos/Britishisms. Concrit is welcome, as ever.

_Tonight I went running through the screen-doors of discretion_

_For I woke up from a nightmare that I could not stand to see_

_You were wandering out on the hills of Iowa_

_And you were not thinking of me._

– Iowa, Dar Williams

 

 

Buffy pulled the Jeep over onto the side of the road and stood up in her seat, elbows propped on the roll-bar, chin cupped in hand, and watched the sun setting on the road behind her. After a few minutes, as the sky faded through gold and pink to a rich, dark salmon, she reached down to the passenger seat and withdrew the camera from its faded and scored case. It had seen some drama, that case, but the camera itself was as clean and lovingly well-preserved as her weapons used to be. _You can take the girl out of the slaying…_ she thought wryly. Some habits were just ingrained, and caring for the tools of her trade was one such.

 

As the colors darkened so did the shadows between the peaks of the hills, making an appealingly contoured and strangely organic tableau. Not her usual subject, but something about it caught her eye like the wrinkles of a sleeping face. Buffy continued to snap until the light was all but gone before remembering to slide the cell phone out of her back pocket and take a couple from its little camera too. The quality would be dreadful, but she could send it to Dawn, who liked to see where she’d been.

 

 _Loess hills, iowa,_ she wrote in the MMS. _Just passin thru, mor prairie dogs 2moro. U betta not rply strait away, I no wot time it is in oxford xxx_

Then, on an idle thought, she scrolled through her address book to see if… huh. There he was. Kind of a mystery how his number had gotten there, but maybe Giles had programmed it in. Filled suddenly with friendly nostalgia and the scent of the warm earth as it exhaled at day’s ending, Buffy sent the photo to him, too.

 

_Hey Riley, guess were I am? I thout you sed iowa was flat, feelin cheatd! Buffy x_

Coming in from Nebraska in the west, she’d hit the hills mid-morning and spent the rest of the day driving north up along their crooked, unexpected spine. It was early summer – May – and her day had been filled with the fresh green of new leaves and lush, rolling hills like she hadn’t seen since England. Cows grazed the fertile pastures and birds sang up in the trees; when she stopped for lunch she saw butterflies and bees. It was a brash reminder of what the season meant to the rest of the world – not the end, but a rich and new beginning. She’d thought then briefly how she would’ve liked to’ve been a farmer in a place like this, the turning of the seasons, swords to ploughshares and all that, and then laughed at the image for the next twenty minutes.

 

In the afternoon she got out and hiked an isolated path, feeling like the only person in the world. It wasn’t half so lonely as she might’ve thought, cocooned in all that green with the wind in the grass and the wide blue sky a blanket above. She felt bigger here, like the landscape. Like she could unfold everything she was and still find space for it all. A hopeful thought.

 

The sky was darkening now, the first stars coming out, twinkling in the still-warm air. In no hurry, Buffy remained where she was, head tilted back and taking it all in. Times like these she could feel herself slowing down enough to catch the thread of herself, and ever so gently tug. One day, she felt, it would all unravel clear as that Iowa sky. For now, patience. It had taken three years and loss beyond words, but she had finally learned to be kind with herself.

 

The phone’s vibrating took her by surprise, but it was not the reply she’d been expecting.

 

_Hi Buffy! Good to hear from you, it’s been a while! Not sure where you are exactly but we’re in Huxley IA visiting my folks and it’s turned into kind of a party. Welcome to join us if you want to experience an authentic Iowan cookout. Let me know for directions. Riley._

Something about the impeccable grammar and that period after his name made her smile; she’d never met his family and ‘we’ undoubtedly meant Sam, but what the hell? After spending such a pleasant day on his home soil she was feeling charitable towards him and his. And it _was_ kind of why she was here, after all.

 

*

 

Making up with Riley soothed something in her soul she hadn’t even known was hurting. Some aches were so old you just got used to them, she figured, and she’d resented him a long, long time. But all said and done it wasn’t natural for Buffy to be at odds with friends and loved ones, and finding that Riley (and Sam) could maybe be both of those things was sweet like the crest of that hill, a rolling vista beneath her and lifeblood pumping in her veins.

 

“You’re quieter now,” Sam observed as the two of them took a breather from the Finn clan’s exuberance, two outsiders gathered together in the corner. “Something happened, didn’t it?”

 

Her look was of concern and sympathy, and Buffy raised her camera quickly to capture it. (Sam was still tall as an amazon, and looking at it later Buffy saw she’d caught an angle along the nose that gave her a look of condescension she didn’t remember noticing at the time).

 

“What _didn’t_ happen?” Buffy said vaguely after a moment’s consideration, but Sam just nodded as though she understood perfectly.

 

“You can only lose so much before you lose your ease in a crowd as well.” She smiled a little sheepishly, managing to convey her own lack of comfort here among her husband’s people, and that was really the moment Buffy caved and let herself like the woman. Then Sam’s expression turned grey, contemplative, and Buffy fought the urge to once again put the camera in her face. “Isn’t it funny how others’ dying strips so much from the living?”

 

“Funny ha ha, or funny peculiar?”

 

Sam glanced at her sharply and grinned at the off-color humor with the immediacy of the veteran she now certainly was. “Bit of both, don’t you think?” she suggested, and laughed like it was still easy. Buffy took two pictures, the long arch of her neck as Sam put her whole body into it, then watched through the eyepiece as the levity played itself out. Digesting people through a thumbnail-sized lens somehow made more sense to her than a whole college-level psychology course.

 

*

 

“You’re drunk, Agent Finn.”

 

“That the only way you can accept an apology, Buffy?” His boyish smile still got to her on some level. “Okay then, guess I’ll be drunk.”

 

Oh boy. The confessional stage could be the most fun or the least, and sensing where this was headed Buffy cast around grimly for Mrs. Finn (either of them) to come to her aid. Luck, no such.

 

She didn’t want to talk about it. She never wanted to talk about it. But here was Riley Finn talking about it – that year she came back from the dead.

 

And apologizing, for disrupting her life even further.

 

 

And talking about her decision to remove Spike’s chip as though he had no particular judgement to cast.

 

Times like this, Buffy wanted to turn the camera on herself, to dissect her own expression through the lens.

 

“So I guess things worked out with you guys after Sam and I left?” he asked as they found a seat on a hay bale out in the quiet, dry must of the barn, beer bottles clinking as he passed her one. “I mean, if you decided to lose the chip instead of...” he trailed off with an eloquent gesture, encompassing, presumably, the end result of Spike’s brain dribbling out of his ears.

 

Buffy bridled instinctively at the influx of memory the question brought forth because _no one ever wanted to talk about it._ But somehow, the sharp tide receded and she found herself smiling.

 

“Not exactly,” she said, took a sip of the beer (sweet and earthy like the sun on her face as she drove through the hills with the canvas roof down), took a breath, and told him everything. How she broke up with Spike after they’d blown up his crypt together, how he’d hurt her (but how she’d hurt him first), how he went and fought for his soul and her trust, and eventually saved the world.

 

“You really fell for him,” Riley said, surprised but not especially bitter, and Buffy felt her smile deepen and settle to something sad but more permanent.

 

“I really did.”

 

She didn’t realize she had tears in her eyes until Riley’s hand – too big – warped and wobbled on its way to her shoulder.

 

“But Buffy,” he said gently, “I don’t understand. What happened?”

 

She looked up at him, that big, open face she’d once loved so well. Were they adults now? Were they talking like adults? “He died. In the hellmouth. He died closing it up. He saved us, but…”

 

Something strange passed across Riley’s face but she didn’t have her camera handy to understand it properly.

 

“You need to speak to Giles about that,” he told her. “You really _need_ to speak to Giles.”

 

*

 

She woke Giles to speak to him. Right there and then, she couldn’t wait, and called him from the farmhouse surrounded by a gaggle of curious Finns.

 

“How could you let me find out like this?” she asked him at last, after the arguing and begging and tone of her voice had finally worn him down.

 

She had sunk, at some point, to sit in a chair, folding over herself with her forehead in her hand, the tight corners of herself folded up once more in an origami Buffy – soft parts hidden away.

 

“Quite frankly, I hoped you never would.”

 

“Giles,” she breathed, “after all this time…”

 

“My dear girl, it was Spike who wanted it this way.”

 

*

 

She was better, these days, at this openness thing, though her emotions remained tentative creatures that often needed coaxing into the light. Still, she never could bear to cry in front of others, and saved it all up until a door was locked safely behind her, quiet even then as was her habit.

 

Slowly the stir she had caused settled; the house settled. A soft moan drifted through the wall from the other guest room next door. The wooden frame creaked with a gust of wind off the prairie. Buffy reached for her camera and took a picture of herself before mopping up her eyes and nose, then deleted it again almost immediately.

 

Spike was alive. He’d survived the hellmouth and spent a year with Angel and his crew; survived the LA apocalypse and gone to work with Faith in Cleveland. Survived the last two years there and was still alive right now, in fact, fighting the good fight without ever having wanted her to come find him. Or to come find her. The magnitude of the betrayal was…

 

She didn’t sleep, but fetched her laptop and connected the camera, and paged through the photographs of the last few days: faces upon faces of the people Dawn called ‘prairie dogs’, the Portrait of the American Midwest project the magazine had set her to. The editor who’d commissioned her had talked about her talent for capturing the _human story_ – something that made her snort then as she remembered it. He didn’t have the first idea.

 

Then came the hills at sunset, rippling with color, a sudden calm after all those strangers. Then there was Riley dancing with his mother, her face a picture as he stepped on her toe. There were the three cousins, pretty as peacocks, but the girl on the end could barely hide her contempt for the other two. There were Sam and Riley together, a quiet moment with the light just so, looking into each other’s eyes.

 

Buffy studied the last image for some time, enlarging it to fill the screen. What was it there that she was missing? Love? Trust? Both things she had withheld until far too late, it seemed. And more. But she hadn’t known anything back then, had hardly had time to string two thoughts together, and Spike was always the one who had seen it all regardless.

 

But he hadn’t seen. Or worse, he didn’t want to see it any longer.

 

Because he’d died, and she’d grieved, and missed him like a vital organ, but she’d _known_ that he’d loved her, right to the end. Only it wasn’t the end, for him, and that must mean…

 

No wonder Riley hadn’t wanted to tell her himself. No wonder Giles had needed bullying. The bitterness descended and she knew she’d have been better off not knowing after all. He was in Cleveland, but he didn’t want her to know that, and so she wouldn’t go to him. She couldn’t. And she cried some more, out of anger and heartbreak, and finally fell into sleep.

 

*

 

In her dream, Spike was outside in the daylight, and nothing about that seemed impossible. They were walking together, the path she’d followed the day before through the Loess Hills, he with that pretty little smile around his mouth and the soft look of adoration in his eyes that she’d folded up tight in her heart like a treasure. It was a look that was just for her, always, but when she spoke to him, to seek an explanation for his silence, he didn’t seem to hear her, and carried on without her over the hill crest, and she realized then his look wasn’t for her any longer.

 

She woke weeping – she couldn’t _stand_ it – and made a different decision from the night before.

 

*

 

So she thanked her hosts and swapped promises and numbers, and got in the car to drive ten hours straight east and ten miles above the limit with the roof down and the wind like cool fingers in her hair. Half-way there she realized she was smiling, she was ebullient, feeling a joy so big it was beyond her to contain it all, and so she reached up to the sky, hands open, laughing like it was easy.

 

*

 

When she got to him, after Faith and that other slayer and the young man who called himself a watcher – when she got to him, finally, her heart was in her throat and the smile was brittle but still present.

 

“Buffy,” he said when he came to the door. Breathed, really, and she’d left her camera in the car out on the street but perhaps all those faces over all those years had finally given her some kind of internal lens because she looked at him then across the threshold and understood with perfect clarity exactly what she was seeing.

 

“You idiot,” she told him. “How could you think that?”

 

“You had everything going for you, love, a new life, away from all this—”

 

He gestured weakly with his left hand to the battle-axe it looked as though he’d been cleaning.

 

“I didn’t,” she whispered, putting her hands on his cheeks, a better frame for him than the edges of a laptop screen. “I didn’t have everything. And anyway I’d have given it all up in a heartbeat if I’d known.”

 

“That’s what I was afraid of,” he whispered back, but he was starting to smile now too.

 

“No it wasn’t,” she said, kissing him softly. “Spike, you are _such_ an idiot.”

 

His arm around her waist drew her close. “What does this mean?” he asked her intently, then dropped his gaze and muttered, “Besides the obvious aspersions on my intellect. Nice to see nothing’s changed there.”

 

The old fear rose up with the remembered words, that teetering on the edge of a long, long fall she had once not dared hope she’d survive; how much worse had she survived since then? Unwinding from him slightly she lifted his chin until he looked at her again.

 

“It means I love you, dummy,” she said. She smiled as she kissed him a second time, then sobered and repeated more gravely, “I love you.”

 

“Oh,” Spike said, looking a little stunned. “Right then.”

 

He pulled her in and closed the door behind them. Pushed her back against the door and buried his face in her neck. She held him for the longest time, and let him shake, and murmured words of reassurance that she’d never said before.

 

“So you’re a photographer now,” he said a while later, after a long, sweet kiss. “Should have brought your camera in with you, love.” She raised her eyebrows and he smirked in that way that turned her knees hot and weak, his eyes bright with feeling, darkening with intent. “Something tells me this night is going to be one to remember.”

 

Buffy nearly laughed with the sensations bubbling through her. “I don’t need a camera for that,” she said. “Not with you.” She thought about it a moment, and grinned. “Though I might _want_ it.”

 

Spike growled at that, and there was no more talk for some time.


End file.
